Wednesday, April 16, 2008

High Island Beach Scenics

This kicks off a new category, "Photo Diary", where I intend to feature a photo or two from an outing that I've had. I frequently get to shoot just a bit while out and about (that's the great thing about photography - cameras are portable!), but not enough to justify a dozen+ photo "gallery" page on my photo website. So I'm going to feature these one-off* photos on my blog.


* I would have used the term, "one-hit-wonder", but that would imply that these photos are actually good :-)


First up: the beach at High Island, Texas. My family and I watched the sunset and moonrise as we spent an evening on the beach last month. The beach is riddled with shells, rocks, and broken glass, yet I chanced fate and walked around barefoot just because I wanted to feel free. My body got a refreshing shock when the water surged up and blasted around my ankles. Yep, check 1 - I'm alive, and check 2 - the water's damn cold.


After reassuring myself that I had a pulse, two things about the beach really caught my attention (besides everything being bathed in the warm pink-orange light of sunset), 1) the old piers and pelicans, and 2) the moonrise.




click for larger pics


Both were shot on a tripod with a Canon 5D + 17-40mm lens. I chanced fate again with the first shot and put my tripod in the water with the camera set low. I actually had to pick the whole rig up when a big surge came rolling up to prevent salt water splashing up on my gear.


I would loved to have stayed long past sunset. I was itching to get some long exposures of the surf with either the moon in the composition, or perhaps reflections of the moon on the water or wet sand. But, it had been a long day and my family was with me and not as eager to particpate in the joys of near-dark long-exposure landscape photography on a windy and cold public beach :-) (sounds like fun, huh?)

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